church this week, and as our two front wheels hit the curb on the far side of the off-ramp, a large red SUV banged into our rear fender. We spun up onto the grassy area of the freeway intersection that surrounded a large pond. I had only a moment to notice that the cropped grass seemed to be switching places with the night sky. Then the car bounced hard and the passenger air bag exploded into my face. It felt like I had been in a pillow fight with Mike Tyson; I was still stunned as the car flipped onto its roof, hit the pond, and began to fill with water.
C H A P T E R 2 0
Iam not shy about admitting my modest talents.
For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem l
ike a very large character flaw.
The last look I had at Deborah before the water closed over her head was not encouraging, either. She was hanging from her seat belt unmoving, with her eyes closed and her mouth open, just the opposite of her usual state, which was probably not a good sign. And then the water flooded up around my eyes, and I could see nothing at all.
I also like to think that I react well to the occasional unexpected emergency, so I’m quite sure my sudden stunned apa-thy was the result of being rattled around and then smacked D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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with an air bag. In any case, I hung there upside down in the water for what seemed like quite a long time, and I am ashamed to admit that for the most part, I simply mourned my own passing. Dear Departed Dexter, so much potential, so many dark fellow travelers still to dissect, and now so tragi-cally cut short in his prime. Alas, Dark Passenger, I knew him well. And the poor boy was finally just about to get married, too. How more than sad—I pictured Rita in white, weeping at the altar, two small children wailing at her feet. Sweet little Astor, her hair done up in a bouffant bubble, a pale green bridesmaid dress now soaked with tears. And quiet Cody in his tiny tuxedo, staring at the back of the church and waiting, thinking of our last fishing trip and wondering when he would ever get to push the knife in again and twist it so slowly, watching the bright red blood burble out onto the blade and smiling, and then—
Slow down, Dexter. Where did that thought come from?
Rhetorical question, of course, and I did not need the low rumble of amusement from my old interior friend to give me the answer. But with his prompting I put together a few scattered pieces into half a puzzle and realized that Cody—
Isn’t it odd what we think about when we’re dying? The car had settled onto its flattened roof, moving with no more than a gentle rocking now and completely filled with water so thick and mucky that I could not have seen a flare gun firing from the end of my nose. And yet I could see Cody perfectly clearly, more clearly now than the last time we had been in the same room together; and standing behind this sharp image of his small form towered a gigantic dark shadow, a black shape with no features that somehow seemed to be laughing.
Could it be? I thought again about the way he had put the 1 8 4
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knife so happily into his fish. I thought about his strange reaction to the neighbor’s missing dog—much like mine when I had been asked as a boy about a neighborhood dog I had taken and experimented with. And I remembered that he, too, had gone through a traumatic event like I had, when his bio-logical father had attacked him and his sister in a terrifying drug-induced rage and beat them with a chair.
It was a totally unthinkable thing to think. A ridiculous thought, but— All the pieces were there. It made perfect, poetic sense.
I had a son.
Someone Just Like Me.
But there was no wise foster father to guide his first baby steps into the world of slice and dice; no all-seeing Harry to teach him how to be all he could be, to help change him from an aimless child with a random urge to kill into a caped avenger; no one to carefully and patiently steer him past the pitfalls and into the gleaming knife blade of the future—no one at all for Cody, not if Dexter died here and now.
It would sound far too melodramatic for me to say, “The thought spurred me to furious action,” and I am only melodramatic on purpose, when there is an audience. However, as the realization of Cody’s true nature hit me, I also heard, almost like an echo, a deep unbodied voice saying, “Undo the seat belt, Dexter.” And somehow I managed to make my suddenly huge and clumsy fingers move to the belt’s lock and fumble with the release. It felt like trying to thread a needle with a ham, but I poked and pushed and finally felt something give. Of course this meant that I bumped down onto the ceiling on my head, a little hard considering that I was under water. But the shock of getting thumped on the head cleared D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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away a few more cobwebs, and I righted myself and reached for the opening where the car’s door had been knocked away.
I managed to pull myself through and face-first into several inches of muck on the bottom of the pond.
I righted myself and kicked hard for the surface. It was a fairly feeble kick, but quite good enough since the water was only about three feet deep. The kick sent me shooting up to my knees and then staggering to my feet, and I stood there in the water for just a moment retching and sucking in the wonderful air. A marvelous and underrated thing, air. How true it was that we never appreciate things until we must do without them. What a terrible thought to picture all the poor people of this world who must do without air, people like . . .
. . . Deborah?
A real human being might have thought of his drowning sister much sooner, but really, let’s be fair, one can only expect so much from an imitation after what I had been through.
And I did actually think of her now, possibly still in time to do something meaningful. But although I was not really reluctant to rush to the rescue, I couldn’t help thinking that we were asking a bit much of Dutifully Dashing Dexter this evening, weren’t we? No sooner out of it than I had to go right back in again.
Still, family was family, and complaining had never done me a bit of good. I took a deep breath and slid back under the muddy water, feeling my way through the doorway and into the front seat of Deborah’s topsy-turvy car. Something smacked me across the face and then grabbed me brutally by the hair—Debs herself, I hoped, since anything else moving around in the water would surely have much sharper teeth. I reached up and tried to pry apart her fingers. It was hard 1 8 6
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enough to hold my breath and fumble around blindly without receiving an impromptu haircut at the same time. But Deborah held tight—which was a good sign, in a way, since it meant she was still alive, but it left me wondering whether my lungs or my scalp would give out first. This would never do; I put both my hands on the job and managed to pry her fingers away from my poor tender hairdo. Then I followed her arm up to the shoulder and felt across her body until I found the strap of the seat belt. I slid my hand down the strap to the buckle and pushed the release.